Everyone's a Stranger
by Epigone1
Summary: The return of George to the 4077th forces BJ to acknowledge a new aspect of his own life in the camp. A co-fic by Meredith Bronwen Mallory and Epigone. Completed. [Slash]
1. Chapter I

**Everyone's a Stranger**   
A co-fic by Epigone and Meredith Bronwen Mallory

  
  
Of course BJ knew.   
  
In a place like this, you became attuned to certain things, because it was better to focus on the details than on the blinding enormity of the war. He remembered, one night, how Doris Day crooned on the jukebox in the washed-out dimness of Rosie's, and the way Hawkeye looked at him when they ran out of flippant words, but later he never knew who else had been there or what had been said between the silences. Or he knew the way the muscles moved, sinuous and fragile, on a kid under the wide glare of the O.R. lights, chest spread open -- the way BJ sometimes lay in the dark Swamp and thought he felt the wind sweep through the emptiness of his body -- but the kid never had a face. And so, in the same way, BJ knew.   
  
It was a mess, that night in July: the Chinese had broken through the line to the west, and the jeeps rumbled through the compound in a line thick and tortuous as blood. In triage up ahead, Hawkeye stooped and stood endlessly, as if held up by wires, lifted a sheet here, probed a chest wound there. At one point, he paused halfway to the ground, his outline blurring against the sky: the young man below him had murmured something inaudible. Hawkeye touched him on the arm and yelled ahead to Margaret that he'd take this one.   
  
BJ didn't see the boy again until after the operating session. Once they had peeled off their scrubs, baring the new sheen of sweat to the lights, Hawkeye took him by the elbow and led him into post-op, where the older doctor leaned on the bed beside the door and stared earnestly at its occupant.   
  
"This kid's already been here, Beej," Hawkeye said softly.   
  
BJ caught himself mid-yawn and bent over beside him, so that their elbows brushed together over the coolness of the metal rail.   
  
"Yeah?"   
  
"Yeah."   
  
BJ looked at him carefully.   
  
"How long's he been out on the front?"   
  
"I don't know. At least six months; Trap and I treated him for contusions in January."   
  
"Uh huh."   
  
Hawkeye ran a hand through his hair.   
  
"I don't know why the hell the Army hasn't sent him back to the States yet." He surveyed the patient with that look that sometimes came into his eyes when he touched the still. "Well, I guess it's the same reason it hasn't sent us back. It doesn't give a damn."   
  
"Look, Hawk," said BJ, slinging an arm companionably about his neck, "let's go home. Or," -- and he thought of sitting on a bunk still not quite shaped to the contours of his body, the still's tubes warm from someone else's fingers, and Hawkeye watching not him but the gap between the beds -- "or I'll buy you a drink at Rosie's."   
  
Hawkeye went stiff under the curve of BJ's elbow.   
  
"I can't. I've got post-op duty."   
  
BJ drew back his arm reluctantly. Then, with an effort, he said, "Don't worry about it. I'll cover for you. You wanna just go back to the Swamp?"   
  
Hawkeye looked at him, that flicker of -- what? Relief, gratitude, affection? -- showing in his face before he shrugged and turned away.   
  
"All right. Thanks, Beej."   
  
He gave the unconscious patient one more lingering glance over his shoulder and slipped out. BJ heard the hollow creak of the door, and then it was quiet.   
  
He didn't know then. He didn't know, so he pulled up a chair to the bedside of this kid and tried to see Hawkeye and Trapper in the faint scar below his right eye. Which one had stitched that gash up? BJ noted the way the edges smoothed out into the arch of the cheekbone, and he knew it was Hawkeye. Hawk knew how to do that; Hawk knew how to downplay a scar, but not how to conceal it.   
  
He might have dozed off for a time, the wood of the chair firm against his aching back, the dreary hospital illumination heavy on his eyelids -- but not for long. Later, in the still dark, he was sufficiently awake to hear the voices across the room. He couldn't tell whose they were, but in these situations you never could, you never tried to attribute your knowledge to an individual. There was a communal pool of knowledge here, and sooner or later you skimmed it. Not wanting to hear made no difference, because the voices were always there, there was always someone who knew, and who were you to refuse that information?   
  
So, by the end of the night, without ever coming fully awake, BJ knew. He knew who George was, just from the details, scattered words and winks. But after Hawkeye relieved him at two o'clock, pulled him to his feet and helped him stagger the long, dusty way back home, -- when had the compound gotten so wide, and Hawkeye so warm and slow-moving beneath his robe; when had the Swamp become "home"? -- BJ, lying on his bunk and watching his bunkmate move off in redness through the mesh, didn't know who George was to Hawkeye.   
  


* * * * * * * * *

  
BJ had been in Korea long enough to know it was useless to try to trick himself, but he did it anyway-- it was a type of ritual, offering a supplication to the woman in his memory and it kept his other life   
  
(Not home. Ha, home is here, isn't that crazy. What's that they say? Home is where the hea-- Oh, shut up. Don't think about that, just think about how absence makes the heart grow fonder, if you have to think of those stupid clichés at all. What do they know anyway?)   
  
close to him like an open wound over his belly. With his eyes closed and his body laid out carelessly over his bunk, BJ tried, tried hard. In his mind, he made the rough cot dim and vaguely remembered another, wider bed, and those blue-striped sheets Peg put under the overstuffed white comforter. Now, the sounds of the camp had to be banished, and just Peg's soft breathing close to where she'd curled herself against his back, head pillowed on her hands and those few sweet curls dangling over her face. That's right, BJ thought, as if he were a artist sketching things into detail, she's sleeping and....   
  
And he couldn't remember the rhythm of her breathing; he knew she wore a rose perfume, but the smell of roses had dimmed to nothingness in his mind along with the memory of her skin-- just where was that little mole on her neck? the scar on her leg?-- and it all came crashing down. Crashing, not like pieces, but like water with nothing to hold it up, like thunder so loud and so close in his ears he couldn't hear himself think. Slowly, BJ relaxed his jaw where his teeth had been pressed harshly together, as if to bite into that memory-- it was useless, and he simply lay there with his mind fully awake inside his exhausted body. Briefly the world diffused and he was treated to the flicker of an image he didn't really want to see; sleep and wakefulness were the same always because he was trapped. (Trapped. Trapper. Let's not think about that.)   
  
Awareness.   
  
"--this is just disgusting!" A nasal, high voice with just that small edge of perpetual panic.   
  
"Frank," Hawkeye now, tone full of exaggerated patience, "what did we tell you about wetting the bed?"   
  
"You're sick, Pierce," Frank sputtered, and behind the fleshy-darkness of his eyelids, BJ could just imagine Hawkeye's small, triumphant smile.   
  
"Now, Frank, there's no shame--"   
  
"You know what I'm talking about, you degenerate." A kick against the pitiful stove, sounding hollow. "I won't stand for this again. That... _thing_ doesn't deserve to be in the army! Henry Blake may have been sympathetic towards that sort of _disgusting_--"   
  
"Do you want to borrow my thesaurus?" Here, of course, Hawkeye would be leaning back on his own bunk and raising an eyebrow. "You're repeating yourself, Frank."   
  
"If you were a true American," Frank spat, "you'd know why I'm so angry I can't think straight."   
  
A snort as Hawkeye swallowed his laughter. "'Straight'? I'd like proof you've ever thought in the first place."   
  
"Just you wait." Now BJ opened his eyes slightly, watching the blur of Frank stand over Hawkeye, brandishing his admonishing finger like a sword. "Potter-- thank God-- is regular army. He'll see that things are properly taken care of this time, bucko. Just you wait, I'll get that deviant--"   
  
"And his little dog, too?" Hawkeye offered, rolling his eyes. "Come on, Frank, don't make BJ and me--"   
  
(Yes, "BJ and me," easy, assuming, and in his own mind BJ could imagine that faceless, featureless form of Trapper John standing behind Hawkeye in some other time. Back you up, buddy, one hundred percent, always. And, in the cot still molded to someone else, still loose and tight in all the wrong places, BJ closed his eyes and swallowed that lingering, unnamed emotion clinging to the back of his throat.)   
  
"Don't make BJ and me," Hawkeye was saying, "tell Margaret about your little momentous--"   
  
"Ha, you think you can blackmail me?" The door slammed, but Frank was still yelling, outside the tent and probably walking backward, too. "I mean business, this time, and you jim-dandy can't do thing one about it!"   
  
Yes, exit Frank, stage whatever, as long as he's gone, BJ thought, and listened to the now-familiar sounds of Hawkeye mixing a drink. Then there came the touch BJ hadn't even been aware he'd been waiting for-- the other captain's hand on his shoulder, resting there for a moment.   
  
"Hey, you're on in ten," Hawkeye joked, handing BJ a drink even as the younger man sat up. "I hope you got enough beauty sleep."   
  
"With a face like this," BJ said with his words mostly in the gin, "how can I go wrong?" Hawkeye flashed a brief tilt of his lips and proceeded to search the floor for semi-clean articles of clothing, pulling them on with unselfconscious grace.   
  
"I suppose," the older doctor said as he pulled a shirt over his head, "it's too much to hope that if we throw water on Frank, he'll melt."   
  
"If that was true," -- BJ turned his back a little to dress -- "we'd have found a little puddle of Frank in the showers long ago."   
  
"Yuck." Hawkeye made a face around his smirk. "Can you imagine stepping in that?" He reached for BJ, pulling the other man to his feet. "Come, my dear-- our adoring fans await!" The dim smell of shell powder touched over BJ as they walked through the compound, and he stumbled, just once, before he moved a little away from Hawkeye and began to feel his new separateness amidst the vague, gray morning tents.   
  


* * * * * * * * *

  
(Why call attention to it, why drag it out into the light where it can be seen and damn it, first they took away my family and my daughter's childhood and now they're taking away the one good thing in Korea and why can't I be blithely unaware, why do I have to think about it at all?)   
  
Peg, if he could only just focus on Peg and her soft glory waiting behind those golden gates-- of the lethe in her embrace and maybe one day, he'd wake up and Korea would just be a dream he'd had, all of it, and Hawkeye just a quick, crazy element of his sleeping mind. Subconscious, the "id" -- no one can control that.   
  


* * * * * * * * *

  
In post-op, BJ counted all the patients in "line" ahead of George and watched the numbers dwindle until he was standing just behind Hawkeye, watching the older doctor pull down the clipboard with flair.   
  
"Morning, George," Hawkeye said, moving to sit down on an empty bed, while BJ kept his hands on the metal rail and his body behind it. The younger doctor nodded towards the patient, his smile sincere but his eyes watching, seeing, taking everything in. George had his hands folded politely in his lap; his eyes moved between his two visitors and settled on the one he knew. "Are you enjoying the wonderful view of bedpans and IV dips?" Hawkeye winked. "We set it up just for you."   
  
"It's lovely." George's smile was earnest and laughing.   
  
"Good," said Hawkeye, tapping the clipboard for emphasis. "Only the best for our faithful customers." Lifting a hand briefly in BJ's direction, the older doctor leaned in to examine the dressing on George's shoulder. "This is BJ Hunnicutt-- Trapper John was sent back to the States, so they brought him in."   
  
"My condolences," George said to BJ, though his eyes were looking at Hawkeye through the fall of his messy blond bangs.   
  
BJ laughed shortly.   
  
"Ah, but you're the one who's had to come down our assembly line twice in, what, four months?" And -- damn it, there he went again -- he looked to Hawkeye; he was speaking to George, but somehow everything spiraled back into Hawkeye, and he didn't want to think about time in terms of months anymore. Here, there was no time in that sense, no continuity, and maybe, just maybe, if he thought it hard enough, no causality. Just sharp, short bursts of awareness, no obligation to anything outside of the dust and the blood and the places his eyes went illicitly, unthinkingly.   
  
Hawkeye smiled, the faintest angle of bitterness in the line of his mouth, and said, "Yeah, by now he knows the ins and outs of the great American meat-processing facility."   
  
George's glance settled on BJ, as if he wanted to examine more closely this man who knew how to cut straight to the quick of Hawkeye's blustering humor.   
  
"You guys do a good job," he said after a beat, letting his smile broaden again and his eyes return to Hawkeye. "I would've liked to tell Doctor McIntyre that, too, that I appreciate - " He paused, shifting in the bed ever so slightly, the arm nearer to BJ tucking under the blanket. "What you did."   
  
"I'd hate to think that I completely wasted my time in med. school," said Hawkeye lightly. "I mean, aside from my pretty female colleagues and the out-of-the-way broom closets, I really did do some studying." He concluded the brief examination and placed his hands on his knees. "Good to see you've got some honest combat wounds this time," he kidded.   
  
This time, George looked right at BJ, his face bare and vulnerable, and BJ thought, God, wasn't there a time we all knew how to be so honest? When he had arrived, maybe, he hadn't known how to close himself off, had even exposed to the air the rawness that Peg left -- but at some point he brought it back into himself, because Hawkeye looked at him oddly about it, and soon it was as though he had smothered it under the weight of secrecy. He tried to dredge it up sometimes; now, faced with George and Hawkeye and the bright pinpoints of the post-op lights, he tried in earnest to dredge it up, chafe it back into being, recreate the shiver of her eyes down his spine. But Hawkeye, blinding as any shot of gin they shared in the inviolate Swamp, drowned all that out when he glanced up, grinned, and leaned across the bed rail to pat BJ on the arm.   
  
"It's all right," he assured George, his shoulders moving with cat's grace as he bent over. "BJ's no Frank."   
  
The ache that BJ had been cultivating was gone instantly, scorched out by the exquisite agony of Hawkeye's fingers -- and BJ smiled dully and thought, The best laid plans of mice and men--   
  
"I do try," he said.   
  
Hawkeye smirked without really seeing him, taking the remark at face value. And why shouldn't he, when he still thought BJ's face could tell no lies?   
  
"I've got to see to some other patients," BJ said abruptly. "Business is brisk, you know, and" -- he gave a brittle smile to George -- "you're already in the best of hands." He freed himself from those hands, pulling away so that Hawkeye's arm pressed the metal bar for a moment, trapped. But then he liked to be trapped.   
  
BJ turned and moved off down the row of white cots. He went swiftly, purposefully, until all he felt was the fluidity of his strides and the unyielding slap of his feet against the floor, the iron bed rails rising up on him from all sides.   
  


**To be continued**


	2. Chapter II

****

Chapter II

It's only human nature to seek out entrapment. There is something comforting in being limited, in knowing the world extends only so far. It is only in being held that anyone has substance. 

So it was natural for BJ to indulge that pull between himself and Hawkeye, protean, tenuous, sheer as a length of fishing line, only visible in his hands when the light caught it in a certain way -- but tightening, always tightening, reeling him in. The more he struggled, the more tangled it became. 

Half an hour later, he trudged out into the pale-green heat of July and found Hawkeye leaning with exaggerated ease against the outside wall. BJ hesitated, crossing his arms over his chest as if to hold something in, his ribs aching with the pressure of that retention. 

Hawkeye smiled wearily and, pushing off the wall, wandered over to join him. 

"Beej," he said, resting an arm on the other doctor's shoulder in an unconscious echo of the previous night. His tone was airy, casual. "You wanna tell me what's wrong?" 

"Wrong?" asked BJ, leaning into Hawkeye even as his throat closed up. 

Hawkeye shoved him playfully, but his hand was tight on BJ's upper arm. 

"You walked out on that kid so fast we thought you'd seen Frank. What, was it something we said?" 

"I--" But there was no wisecrack with which to counter that. "There's nothing wrong. I just have my patients to think about, and you -- you have yours." 

"Oh," said Hawkeye, and there seemed to be a shift in the way he was touching BJ, though there really was no change. "I see. So when did this new development happen? While I was brushing my teeth?" and his voice was filled with-- this is crazy-- almost fondly tolerant sarcasm. "BJ, you and I swap patients all the time. Heck, we take care of Frank's too, since with him it's like the mentally rotted leading the sick, if you know what I mean." BJ moved to walk forward, ahead, away, but somehow Hawkeye went with him, and there they were, two army doctors, those tricksters, hips touching together as though they ought to have been joined. 

"I--" BJ groped, finding he couldn't even remember what he'd intended to say. Hawkeye's hand was warm and he was cold, but he only knew that he was cold because of Hawkeye's hand and if it would just go away then he wouldn't know it anymore. 

"Come on," the older doctor said. "Seriously, Beej. What's the matter?" 

"Nothing." BJ waved the concern off. "It's just... nothing." 

"What?" Hawkeye studied an imaginary checklist. "D'you get a letter from Peg? A patient from San Francisco? Are you upset that I took your socks-- hey, they had holes in 'em already from a certain Bigfoot I'm bunking with." 

"Doesn't a guy have a right to his own problems?" BJ asked, letting the words out through his teeth. Ducking into the Swamp, he headed for his bunk, silently thanking something for the absence of their third tentmate. 

"All right, all right," Hawkeye let the door close loudly, saying to the open room, "Honey, we're home." 

(Home-- 

On Cherry Street, just a little ways before it meets up with Harbor Lane. The red brick house with the windows facing out over the hill so you can see the tops of buildings in the valley. Black shutters, and that wrought-iron eagle you put up on the door for a knocker and the crooked mailbox you just never got around to fixing. Open the door, come on, a man's got to remember his own home, surely, or else.... 

//shhhh... shhh...// 

So, right, there's the hallway with the black-and-white painted pictures of Erin in her cute little miniature baby dresses, holding a ball, giving a toothless smile. The stairwell, with the worn blue mat on the landing, and upstairs Peg's room (our room?) is all the way on the end and when you come in her vanity is on the right and your dresser is on the left, his and hers, blue and pink. 

But in the Swamp, which has now suddenly and inexplicably become home-- crazy, crazy, boy, is Klinger gonna have a bird when you get his section eight-- 

No. In the Swamp, it's ours and Frank's; neatness and the Bible and the stony-eyed woman in the silver frame. On the right, two bunks and a still, Hawkeye's robe, BJ's argyle socks, and boots and books and all thrown together. No real distinction. ) 

Laying his arm over his face, BJ rested wearily against his pillow, only opening his eyes when Hawkeye offered him a cure-all glass of gin. 

"Listen," Hawkeye said casually, slipping into his robe as if it were a second skin, "Frank and Hotlips have been doing mating calls today that would make a monkey blush, so I told George to stop by later tonight-- have a drink, lose some money...." 

"George?" BJ's voice was neutral, but he was sitting up on one elbow and he couldn't feel the expression on his face, just the whiteness over it, and he saw in Hawkeye's eyes that he'd been caught. 

"Yeah." The other man's shrug betrayed his carefulness. "Is that what this is about?" 

"What what's about?" He closed his eyes, like pulling on a mask. 

"Now you sound like a lightbulb," Hawkeye teased. "Watt! Watt!" Pause, and when BJ did look at Hawkeye again, the other man was sitting on the other bunk, leaning forward in concern. "I said, is this about George?" 

"I don't know," he lied smoothly, with the emphasis all on the first syllable. "I mean--" 

"Well," said Hawkeye with a half-smile, "what's the matter with George?" 

And it came out, the words had been hiding under his tongue and damn it, it was an ambush; disbelief, echoing, "_What's the matter with George_?" 

"Oh-oho--" The other captain laughed in such a way that it was anything but. "Come on, Beej. Is that what this is about? It's not like it's catching." 

"I know _that_." BJ rolled his shoulders and his eyes. "It's just--" 

"Just what?" Hawkeye spread his empty hands. "He's a good kid-- it's bad enough his unit's turned him into a regular scapegoat all on account of him sleeping with a man once or twice--" 

(And oh, oh, oh-- here's where that saying comes from, "hold your tongue," down like a snake, don't let it go, and that bit of bar soap on your pallet for saying the word "hell" at the dinner table, washing your mouth out. If thy tongue doth betray thee, then cut it off, because the things you say--!) 

Quietly, BJ asked, "Have you?" 

"What?" Just one word, and an expression like a wide-gaping grin of confusion on Hawkeye's face. 

"Nothing," the younger surgeon said quickly. "Nothing." 

"I _heard_ what you said." Yes, there was that smile, and only that tiny fissure like a crack in the ice on those blue, blue eyes. "I just can't believe you said it!" 

"Look," BJ was biting his lip and trying to talk around it at the same time, "Hawk-- please, I didn't mean it." He'd tried so hard all day not to, but he reached out and put his hand on Hawkeye's arm, felt the worn terry cloth and the skin underneath it, because he was beginning to feel miles and miles coming into the few feet between himself and his best friend. 

(Is there another term for this? Lover is only when you've slept together. Ah, such fine points of distinction.) 

"I didn't mean it," BJ said to make it true. "I don't know what I was thinking. I guess I just--" He looked up to those eyes and found understanding (forgiveness) already halfway imparted upon him. "I hadn't really ever thought about stuff like that." 

(It's not really a lie, not _really_, because you haven't thought about it, not in the abstract sense that there must be people like _that_. Only in the dark with the floodlights making strange shapes in the compound and Hawkeye only two feet away, that body that you know from all those little touches. Or in those odd moments when he's just close enough in a certain way and you think, if he was a... (you don't even say he would have to be peg) you would know what to do, but you're happy with the confusion because that's part of who he is. How does it even work-- how would you--? You don't know, which is maybe why moments sometimes hang waiting for you to do _something_.) 

"It threw me," BJ found himself saying presently. "It wasn't fair for me to take it out on you." With some relief, because it had surfaced in his own mind that it was true, "You're right, I'm no Frank Burns. It just took me a bit to get used to the idea." 

"Well, I know that, you dummy." Hawkeye's voice was thick with affection. "Look, I was being an ass too, getting up on my soapbox. All's fair, eh?" 

(in love and in war and even when they're the very same thing) 

BJ held out his hand, let Hawkeye clasp it and shake, holding his aorta where his palm should have been. A smile. "All's fair." 

"You know," Hawkeye said after a beat, getting up to fix another drink, "that really wasn't a fair question for you to ask me, anyway." Gentle, smile in the words. 

Carefully, "Oh?" 

"Well," Hawkeye slanted his hips, moving one hand to his short black locks with a decadent flair, "after all, _I_ am Hawkeye Pierce, famous delinquent degenerate pervert." He winked. "You-- you're about as clean as a bar of Dial soap, and I'm not talking about the mold-encrusted ones we have in the showers here." 

BJ smiled at that, folding his hands in his lap. He trapped them between his knees as Hawkeye just looked at him with that grin, strange mixture of childishness and suggestiveness, BJ like a moth battering itself ragged to get at the light, holding back his hands. 

"You make it sound like a bad thing," he said finally, weakly. 

Hawkeye, a drink in each fist, paused and looked down at him. 

"No," he replied, the grin smoothing out a little, "God, no, BJ, it's nice." BJ glanced up, bemused, and Hawkeye ducked his head defensively and explained, "Refreshing, you know? You're as clean as Frank thinks he is, which in and of itself is amazing." He leaned over to pass BJ his glass. 

BJ took it by the stem, his fingers curving away from Hawkeye's. The coolness of it was startling, like their arms dangling together easily over the rail of George's bed-- 

Or like Peg's hands on his face as he rolled toward her, Erin snoring faintly down the hall, and kissed her, all his, dissolving into the pleasant chill of memory, spread out flat and unending as flower petals pressed in the pages of his life. Safe and gray and faded. 

He shivered and took the glass, not Hawkeye. Even though Hawkeye was his in the way that all of Korea had become his, an extension of himself, craziness from within. To touch him would be natural, it was already coalescing in BJ's head 

(The very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand -- and Hawkeye laughing fondly, saying, You know a lot of poetry, don't you? And BJ thinking, -- always thinking because, damn it, he couldn't stop thinking -- Not the kind you know. More clichés: poetry in motion, and what kind of idiot would think that upon seeing Hawkeye, bleary-eyed and unshaven, his hunched form vague and wraithlike in the floating darkness of the mirror?) 

"Okay," said BJ, and took a sip. "So we've established I'm a good influence on you." 

"Your suds rub off, huh?" said Hawkeye lightly, settling back down on his bunk. 

"Yeah." BJ laughed halfheartedly. He wrapped his hands around the glass, wishing it were that easy -- if only he could flee out into the spring night, across the red compound, and wash all of this off, shed it like so much dust and dead skin under the white shower-water. 

Hawkeye seemed to consider something for a moment, a darkly amused gleam in his eyes; then he sat up straighter and raised his glass. 

"To us," he offered. "Two of the most unlikely bunkies this side of the Atlantic: Filth and Purity." 

BJ raised his glass as well, and they each downed half of their gin. But there was still a dilute uneasy feeling pooling in the back of BJ's skull: someone loud and boisterous and boyish who crouched on the bed behind him and whispered, Back in my day, we went by Pigpen and Brothel, no distinction. That all-American-boy novelty's gonna wear off real fast. 

"This side of the _Pacific_. You Easterners are oriented all wrong," insisted BJ, trying a smile as he lifted his glass again. Hawkeye arched an eyebrow, but he obligingly echoed the toast, and together they drained their glasses. 

It was at that point that someone knocked on the door. 

Hawkeye, jumping up almost guiltily, called, "Our door is always open, 'specially if you're warm and female." 

George let himself in, waving a hand in greeting. 

"Will I do?" 

BJ flinched ever so slightly, but Hawkeye was too involved in playing the concerned host to notice. 

"George! Welcome to our humble abode. Let me introduce you around. Let's see... in that corner, we have the roach clan; not very friendly, except when we turn out the lights, and then they love to come out and pay social calls. In this corner," -- he was leading George by his uninjured arm, ushering him toward Frank's cot -- "we have our cohabitant, Frank Burns -- oh, wait, he's out, that's just his dirty laundry. You picked a good time to swing by. You know BJ, of course, co-proprietor and all-around good guy, and then, in this last corner, we have our most honored personage." He paused in front of the still and adopted an attitude of reverence. "The giver of life in liquid form." 

George chuckled and looked to BJ for approval. BJ, his legs crossed and his arms folded, was smiling with an evident effort, and George sobered, biting his lip. 

"Gosh, Hawkeye, I didn't realize it was so small in here -- I don't want to crowd you guys. There's not enough room for a three-person card game, is there?" 

"Of course there is," rejoined Hawkeye, pouring him a drink and leading him to a cot. "We don't want to use Frank's bunk -- we doctors have issues with sterility, you understand -- but we'll manage. You can sit on my bunk, BJ and I'll share his, and we'll set up the game in the middle." George shot a sideways glance at BJ, but Hawkeye pushed him gently down onto the cot and dragged a small bedside table into the gap. "There, see?" He produced a deck of cards from his footlocker. "Poker all right with everybody?" 

His companions nodded their assent. There was a pause while Hawkeye looked searchingly at the empty spot on BJ's mattress, but then he stepped over, too quickly, and sat beside BJ. 

They fit together awkwardly on the narrow bunk, Hawkeye's elbows bumping BJ as he shuffled the cards, his lanky frame thin and sharp against BJ's side. The cot was not the only thing still shaped emptily to the past, but things could change, if BJ wanted it enough, if he gave it time-- 

No, no, no. He shrank away a little, let himself blur into the riffle of cards between Hawkeye's dexterous fingers, Peg and Erin and the dog and the plush furniture and the neat patchwork garden and the approving faces of their parents framed in burnished metal down the halls 

(Your full house beats this one pair any day.) 

**

To be continued

**


	3. Chapter III

**

Chapter III

**

George, BJ thought five hands later as he pinched a two of diamonds between his thumb and forefinger. George, I want to ask you a question-- and his inner voice had a tone of almost savage serenity, which he'd only recently come to find at the hollow center of himself.   
  
(A question. Questions. You can never ask just one, things pile up, one leads to another and another. Just like how one of these days there may be a drink, yeah you guys hit the sauce pretty heavy by the bye, and then he'll trail his slim fingers down the side of your face and maybe one night you just won't be thinking or it'll be just at that moment when you want it too much. It's sick-- now this, in Frank Burn's voice, high and edgy because people like him really _do_ think they're right-- that you can go from imagining your wife's pale moon-peach curves to wondering, really wondering how Hawkeye's flesh would feel, warm with chill and rough-smooth against your own.   
A second skin.)   
  
So, yeah, BJ fought his way back to the harsh light of the Swamp and Hawkeye's clever attempts to make George feel more at home. Got to ask you something, George, ask you right now. Rapid-fire, like the sound of quick sapphire bullets in the darkness out past the compound, or that feeling that slides down BJ's spine when Hawkeye leans over just a little toward the end of those lapping-with-blood nights, close and Oh, God....   
  
You know, George, said BJ as he lost to Hawkeye's royal flush, I just want to know-- the one before me, the _guy_ before me, the _married man_ before me, you were here. You saw. I want to know if he flipped back comments at Hawk just three seconds quicker, if his practical jokes were just a hint more perverse than mine, or if he ever found his hands resting on that curve of Hawkeye's just-a-little-too-thin hips, that shape of the bone I've, for some crazy reason, memorized.   
  
(Stop it. Peg's voice, younger. She's crying, because her older brother took apart her bike and won't put it back together, and she loves to zip down the uneven sidewalk with her skirt bunched up around her knees. You're standing next to her, glaring at the brother and looking at the parts all on the lawn. Your hand is on her shoulder and she's saying, Stop it, you-- you-- _awful_, why do you have to break everything of mine?!)   
  
"BJ, Beej--" and that's something no one else calls him, so it's Hawkeye. "You gonna play your hand or form a lasting relationship with it?"   
  
"Well," he returned fondly, almost as quickly as he wanted to, "unlike you, I don't just pull whatever card I need out of my dirty bathrobe."   
  
"You insult my glorious robes of state?" Hawkeye drew back, face contorted in mock affront while George held his laugh behind one fisted hand.   
  
"I fold, anyway." The younger doctor flipped the cards facedown with ease. "All I seem to be pulling tonight is garbage." He glanced up without thinking-- it was hard to tell what George might take personally, back behind that smiling face. It was hard to blame him if he did.   
  
"Well." Hawkeye spread his hands. "There are other card games." He began shuffling again, the red bicycle design flickering and winking at BJ like a single, penetrating eye. "There's gin, old maid, go fish, that weird thing gypsies do at fairs-- and I'm not talking about the wax fortune teller." Winking, the other captain began to toss down cards in an awkward sort of pattern. "I never have understood the point of that...."   
  
"They use different cards, first off." George rested his chin in his hands, and there seemed to be just a change of light shifting over his boyish face. Not a real transformation, but the illusion of one. "You're missing twenty-one cards."   
  
"Twenty-one, huh?" Hawkeye laughed. "I'd hate to try and play poker with them. What, they have an extra suit?" Now his smile was wider. "Squares? Circles? Double-breasted, pin-striped?"   
  
"You kill me," George snorted, shaking his head.   
  
"Don't let the AMA hear you say that," BJ cautioned, reaching to take the cards from Hawkeye. The older man held his hands away, grinning and trying to keep BJ at bay.   
  
"They're mine and you can't have them." Hawkeye snickered childishly. "Gimme a second. I'm gonna tell our good buddy George's fortune here."   
  
There was a faint splash of color in the boy-soldier's cheeks. "So long as there are no landmines or Chinese involved."   
  
"No, no, my dear boy," Hawkeye fingered a card with flair, his voice dropping into thick play-Romanian. "Sit right there and I will tell you. The great Hawkeye knows all, sees all...."   
  
"And the rest, he makes up," BJ put in, dodging a playful swatch from his friend.   
  
Hawkeye 'hmm-ed' deep in his throat, gazing on the mix-matched diamonds, spades, and hearts with carefully solemn eyes. "I see," he intoned, "a tall, handsome stranger in your future."   
  
"That's a nice change." George showed a row of even white teeth, pulling a little at his collar.   
  
(There's a whole choir out tonight, dammit. Sid, he's hearing voices-- Tokyo Laughing Academy, here you come. But it's Hawkeye who you can hear the clearest saying, or singing, low and next to your ear. Does a lot of singing, Hawkeye, in the O.R. and in the shower, in chow line and moving through the post-op ward in a half-hearted shuffle-dance. And sometimes, when he doesn't think anyone is listening because it is dark and quiet and still (the moon, coming through the still) and he's drunk.   
Yes, Hawkeye's voice, just those two feet away, slurred and soft and singing--   
Beware the danger as you cross the great water,   
Beware the strangers new to your eyes....   
  
All right, okay. Nothing's making sense, and under that too-yellow bulb and across the table from a young man who... who _is_ and who _does_, next to a man whose voice you know and whose hip you've brushed, you've got a headache and another ache that don't seem like they'll ever go away.   
  
Cards on the table, faces you know. Beware, Mr. Hunnicutt, I predict-- says the wax gypsy near the pier in old San Fran, where you and Peg used to walk barefoot-- I predict you'll meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger in a foreign land.)   
  
"Damn it." It came out through BJ's thin lips, reverberating in Hawkeye's body as it quieted beside him. He felt those two pairs of eyes-- brownish-hazel, quick, cautious, but also that separate blue, flash in deep water and quicksilver. "Uh. Right. Let's play a different game." BJ rubbed his temples. Dart again, like a quick tail of a star-- concern in Hawkeye's gaze and a hand on BJ's shoulder. Nothing else; open to interpretation, just like the gypsy cards.   
  
"Well, we already suggested go fish," Hawkeye began with amiable care.   
  
"And old maid," BJ pointed out.   
  
A smirk from the other doctor. "Nah, that's Margaret."   
  
Volley back. "Don't let her hear you say that. You won't live through the night."   
  
"I may not as it is," Hawkeye lamented. "My kingdom for a nurse! How about gin?"   
  
"I'd love some." And he reached for the pitcher of moonshine.   
  
(Nice spike back from the all-American boy.)   
  
"Very nice." The other captain raised an eyebrow. "We could try pin-the-tail on Frank."   
  
"Over the one that's already there?" They had that rhythm going again, a careful dance or making love with words. George merely watched, eyes cast somewhere else but still watching.   
  
"The horns are only there to hold up his halo." Hawkeye accepted his glass and poured another for George. "I've got it!" Slapping his knee, the dark-haired man grinned full and cheshire, "Strip Hearts. First time I played, I shot the moon and got Sally Merriman to take off the sundress she was already barely wearing."   
  
(There is no return pitch from the other side-- such a silly thing to stop over, too. Someone, a nurse, once made a comment that Trapper and Hawkeye played strip poker on occasion, and then she shifted her gaze back to the miniature city of pill bottles, as if she'd broken some silent law.   
While we're on horns and halos and the Good Book--   
Thou shalt not mention the Original to his Replacement.   
And BJ, oh, BJ, can't you just _see_ those clothes piled and abandoned on the floor?)   
  
"I don't know how to play Hearts," George said apologetically, "I--"   
  
By some unspoken cue, they stopped, listened to the footsteps navigating through the chill Korean night. Stop, a knock at the door, and BJ looked on Radar's round face with some measure of relief.   
  
"Um, sir?" The clerk flashed a smile-glance at George, before his eyes and his two glass lenses were all on Hawkeye, reflecting Hawkeye. "It's that bowel-resection, Hawkeye, sir-- the nurse says she needs help."   
  
BJ saw something pass swiftly over Hawkeye's face, bitterness and weariness and pained irony, things BJ had come to recognize in his tentmate, if not yet in himself. Then Hawkeye let the cards splay out between his fingers and put them down. When he looked at BJ, his expression was a study in nonchalance.   
  
"I believe I'm being paged," he said, uncoiling from his position beside BJ and sliding out between the small table and the cot. "I've _told_ them never to call me in the middle of important business, but we all know how crass the Army is."   
  
BJ followed him up with legs that didn't feel like his own.   
  
"How about some help?" At first, there was only that smooth taste of relief, and yet he was on his feet, muscles trembling before he trembled himself.   
  
Hawkeye gave him a genuinely startled smile.   
  
"Are you insinuating that I need it?" He waved a hand, let it fall like an afterthought onto BJ's shoulder. "Nah, don't worry about it. It's nothing serious - I'm sure the nurse's already done all of the complicated things. I'm just the token pretty face at the bedside. Comforts the patients." He looked at George, who grinned appreciatively.   
  
"Well - " BJ hesitated. "I-"   
  
"You're too decent for your own good," said Hawkeye with dismissive affection, but his eyes had gone hard and flat, like chipped flint, under the blue. "I'll be fine. You can stay and keep George company until I'm done. It won't take very long."   
  
"Okay," agreed BJ, sighing and attempting to look reassuringly at George. Not your fault, kid, not your fault I can't - we can't - and God, it's so bright in here-   
  
Hawkeye gently removed his hand from where it had slipped to BJ's arm, up close against his greens and the warm, firm angle of his hip.   
  
"I shall return," he proclaimed, dipping into an elaborate bow. BJ, averting his eyes, reached out for the deck and began massing it together in his hands.   
  
  
**

To be continued

**


	4. Chapter IV

**

Chapter IV

**

"What's your favorite two-player game, George?" BJ asked, shuffling the cards clumsily. He felt, rather than saw, the approving smile Hawkeye threw his way - Beej, such a decent guy, ever willing - before the door bumped shut.   
  
George leaned his elbow on the table and pursed his lips.   
  
"Um, to tell the truth,"   
  
(And what else would he do, this impossibly good kid, not his fault his eyes are unshadowed, not his fault that he thinks he must look at Hawkeye and BJ separately, that he shifts his gaze from one to the other. Did he look at Trapper and Hawkeye together then, did he see in Hawkeye some ease and complacency unimaginable now?)   
  
"I really don't know much about cards."   
  
BJ raised his eyebrows, still concentrating on the geometric shape of the deck, solid in his palms.   
  
"You talked like an old hand about that fortune-telling business."   
  
"Oh, well," - George smiled apologetically - "that was just one of those things. My brother and I loved all of that, the supernatural things, as kids. I'm sure I read it somewhere."   
  
"Hmm." BJ paused, the cards jumbled in his fingers, glossy and feeling like Hawkeye under the smoothness; his own skin touched the same spots as Hawkeye's. He laid the cards on the table and began spreading them out.   
  
"That was a long time ago," said George. "Funny, the things that stick with you."   
  
BJ smiled unreadably, tossing the cards out, easy, smooth, you can sort anything into these neat little piles   
  
(He wonders, sometimes, why he doesn't seem to have his own fond childhood memories, like the others: George and his little brother under an old blanket tossed over their bunk bed, camping lantern and tarot cards grinning silver at them in the gloom; or Hawkeye flicking marbles over the Maine dust, suspended whorls of oil-in-water color spinning like dervishes, Hawkeye all scraped knees and coltish beauty. But maybe that's for the best, not remembering, because maybe one night George turned up the Lovers card, tree of flowers and tree of fruit, and saw in it the dark, sinuous betrayals of his flesh to come; or maybe Hawkeye missed a shot and knew, somehow, that someday he'd really be playing for his marbles--   
  
And maybe BJ would have remembered someone crying, because Daddy was married to his work after all--   
  
Or maybe that was just little Peggy Hayden, railing at her brother, watching her bicycle wheel spin and spin and spin on its disconnected axle, running forever into the future and all the pieces lying unrecognizable on the lawn.)   
  
"What're you doing?" asked George.   
  
"Oh - " BJ found his hands empty, the cards all resting before him on the table. "I was going to make a house of cards." He tilted his head up, meeting George's eyes.   
  
George grinned briefly.   
  
"That's not easy. I've never been able to make one, myself."   
  
"Well, you just...." BJ put out a hand, scooped up a few cards. "Uh, you just build a solid foundation...." He faltered. "And you go from there, and - "   
  
They looked at each other.   
  
--And you try not to think about how pointless it is to try to hold up this fragile structure once you've seen there are other things to be done with the hand you've been dealt.   
  
The door swung open, but BJ knew who it was before he turned around.   
  
It was the bad timing-- the sheer, halting, single beat that countered the whole of the evening, tentative though that string of notes had been. A sharp, a flat, so utterly out of tune that BJ could almost see the black wreck of half-notes, rests, and quick, hooked eighths as they collided together in a dead stop. And even before that, there was that thin, clean smell that rotted with what it was meant to cover. BJ's spine straightened in a perverse pre-wince.   
  
"This--" high, whiny, "my _God_-- get out of here, you filthy... abomination!"   
  
"Frank," said BJ with a tired flippancy, watching George's face go very carefully blank, "I live here."   
  
"I'm not talking about _you_, Hunnicutt!" Frank's voice climbed a pitch. "It's that sick pansy! You invited him in here?"   
  
"George?" the captain asked, sparing an innocent glance toward the major. "Really, Frank, we water him every day, he should be fine...."   
  
"Stop. Playing. Games." Frank's hands were fisted in his towel, wet hair at odd and contradictory angles. When George looked up from his careful contemplation of the floor, Frank colored and seemed to pull his body farther into his robe. "You're disgusting, you know that?" The words were aimed at George, but the boy with that straw-blond hair and blue eyes seemed like a slick Norman Rockwell painting, idyllic and impossibly sunshined.   
  
(Well, what do you know. This boy leaves his body too, like Hawkeye, steps out of it like a cumbersome coat if it can't keep up with him. Pulls in, folds onto himself like an equation bending backwards into infinity until he becomes so small... there's a distinct pop, and he's gone.   
POOF! It's magic.   
--a turn of the cards; the star, the world, and the hanged man--   
Where do you go, George, when you walk away from your bones? Is it that same land Hawkeye wanders, hand held over his eyes despite the eternal twilight? Do you know, as he does, that such a place is temporary and you will soon have to return to the rain of shells and red bursts of pain and blood and that thing that crawls over soldiers in the night?)   
  
"You're disgusting," Frank repeated, flinging the words at the young soldier-- they hit their mark and they cut, but George wasn't in there, and he would return to find his body battered and bruised, yes, but he would not feel the initial slice of hate. "Look at you, sitting here in officer's country, daring to look at one of your superiors with that... filthy... _lust_!"   
  
"Don't flatter yourself, Frank." BJ rolled his eyes. "I just ate."   
  
The major touched a hand to BJ's shoulder in a caricature of concern.   
  
"Surely you know what this man is!?"   
  
"A soldier in the US army?" BJ slipped out from under the hand, shuddering and finding in himself a faint protectiveness of George.   
  
(The enemy of my enemy....   
And isn't that which hovers about George less--   
*well, not less dangerous*   
*and, if you'll admit it, much more tempting*   
(hawkeye)   
but certainly preferable to--   
the undisguised bigotry swilling like warm beer in Frank's almost colorless eyes?   
  
Because I can fear that difference in George that strikes a chord with the difference in me. And I can envy him Hawkeye's protective fondness, both for the kid soldier and the memory of stitching next to (Trapper) someone else.... But I can't--)   
  
"He's a--"   
  
"An inmate in our happy little hell-hole?" BJ offered, standing between the irate major and the boy who wouldn't and couldn't fight back against the entire world. "Maybe he's a patient under our care, Frank? Have you thought of that? How about he's a person, a human being? How 'bout you treat him with some dignity?"   
  
"He's a _homosexual_!" There was a vibrato in Frank's voice, high and quavering with terror, because if one of _them_ looked as sweet and nice as all that, then how are you supposed to know who the _us_ is?   
  
"Excuse me," said George, raising a single, inoffensive finger. His voice was calm and perhaps too tinged with politeness; BJ got the feeling the young man had been dipping inside himself for those words since Frank had entered the tent. "I really didn't mean to cause a problem, for anyone. I'll go back to post-op, if that's all right with you."   
  
"Oh, no, bucko." Frank's voice overrode whatever half-formed reply BJ had attempted to express. "You're staying right here. I'm going to go get Colonel Potter, and we'll settle this right now. You don't deserve to be here!"   
  
(A shadow, out of the corner of your eye. Flicker. Relief, down your spine, like a drop of water over glass, and for a minute the only thing you can smell is the wintertime ocean.)   
  
"No one deserves to be here, Frank." And Hawkeye stood in the slightly crooked threshold, arms limp at his sides as if they simply couldn't stand to try and hold things together anymore. His surgical scrubs were white and red and pink and faint-brown with blood and life, and his eyes were closed even though they were open. Taking small, almost utterly motionless steps, Hawkeye passed between Frank and BJ,   
  
(touch. brief. on your arm, his fingers cold and sweaty and then he is gone)   
  
coming to sit next to George on the bunk. Without ceremony, the doctor grabbed for a drink with graceless hands, taking it as if it were acid eating him away. "No one-- goddammit, assuming there is a God and I'm really, seriously reconsidering that-- no one deserves to be here."   
  
"_Pierce_," and yeah, maybe Frank was a ferret-- some type of small, jittery animal, vicious in its inability to think. "You-- you keep protecting this _thing_!"   
  
"Really, Frank, this is why I never take you anywhere," Hawkeye said casually, leaning over toward George. "I'm really sorry about all this-- next time BJ and I will put him on a leash before we have visitors."   
  
"I--" George began, but Hawkeye's blue gaze was earnest.   
  
"Don't you dare say you're sorry." The older doctor lifted a finger. "You don't ever have to apologize to people like him." Then, absently, "Frank, get outta here."   
  
"Hawkeye--," and then there were three on that small army cot, with Captain B. F. Pierce sitting slumped between his patient and his doctor, drinking like someone who had become disinterested in his own destruction.   
  
"Look here, Pierce--" Frank began.   
  
A rustle from the body left in the red robe. "What part of 'get lost' don't you understand?"   
  
"I am an officer in the United States Army--"   
  
"Congratulations," Hawkeye's gaze rolled and was empty. "You're the only one in this room."   
  
"--and I will not tolerate this shameless flaunting in the face of God's Commandments!" It seemed, to BJ, that the major's features became more pinched with each word, and the young captain felt sick of and sorry for him all at once.   
  
"You mean, for example," BJ offered with the words tight in his throat, "like that law about not playing footsie with women who aren't your wife?"   
  
(Ah, ah, thou shalt not....   
Thou shalt not lie-- even to thyself-- thou shalt not kill --'cept when the old men sitting safe in their armchairs order you to do so-- and no, thou shalt not covet.   
Covet, which is desire, wanting, needing, grasping for a chance to touch and hold all of that person between your two arms, to try and distill them and hold them to this moment because damnit, they're always going away....   
Covet.   
Old dusty books of Latin in college, the language of the dead and dying and unchanging. From cupidous, the old word for desirable. To crave, to long for... implying jealousy, of words and deeds done with someone other than yourself, of that which is gone but still leaves a little throbbing ache you feel when you touch his hand.)   
  
BJ found, quite suddenly, that his hand was on Hawkeye's knee, squeezing gently and utterly refusing his muscles' commands to return. Hawkeye's change of posture was like an understanding gaze, but no one else seemed to notice.   
  
"Never mind that!" Frank said, eternally able to turn the mirror away, to refuse with stubborn ignorance to really look at himself. Only the flaws in other people, visible as the bones and ligaments in X-ray.   
  
"Look, Ferret-Face," Hawkeye said with simple, profound distaste. "I don't take orders from you, and I don't take orders from the brass, and I don't even take orders from MacArthur. If God thinks that this" -- he gestured to George -- "nice kid should be killed because of what he believes, then I don't take orders from God, either."   
  
"I--"   
  
"Get out of here!" the older captain cried in frustration. For a moment, the higher officer turned, but seemed to think better of it and came to face the three other men once more.   
  
"Listen here," he addressed BJ, "I know you're a bleeding-heart liberal-- all that 'live and let live'-- but you're gonna regret it. I suggest you follow my original suggestion and get as far away from" -- he shook several fingers in Hawkeye's direction -- "_him_ as you can. We'll see how you like it when he starts trying to molest you!" There was stillness, and Frank's words came into it rough and grating. "Unless, of course, there's more of that sickness around here than I thought."   


**

To be continued

**


	5. Chapter V

**

Chapter V

**

It surprised BJ that he felt no rage. An accusation,   
(Do you want him? To touch him? Do you... --God help you-- love him?)   
so obviously meant to provoke, but it landed against him harmlessly because he already understood what had lodged with such sweet pain inside himself. Nothing was ever going to be simple-- Hawkeye could not be Peg and Peg could not be Hawkeye, nor was that something BJ wanted. Far across the ocean that brought forgetfulness whichever way it was crossed, he understood that _love_ and *love* and /love/ can all mean different things.   
  
And there was a small space, right beside his disgust at Frank, where he pitied the other man because Frank's love, that bit that he had, seemed to wither and feed on itself. So there was that one clear moment that rang with BJ's dull shock, and that was all right, but then....   
  
Hawkeye was up and moving, possibly just in between two beats of BJ's heart; a whirl of red robe, with George backing away and BJ reaching out.   
  
"Hawkeye, what are you--?" BJ asked, watching as the older captain connected his fist with Frank's jaw, the motion etched in calm violence. The major tumbled back onto his bunk, scrambling to press himself into a corner and eye the others with a suspicion that turned BJ's stomach.   
  
"Defending your honor, of course," Hawkeye said lightly, rubbing his fist and looking anywhere save to meet BJ's gaze. To Frank, he said, "I really wish you'd keep your stupidity to yourself, Frank, I really do. You want to argue with me? Fine. But don't sit here and try to throw crap on BJ. He's ten times the man you'll ever be-- even if you do manage to somehow evolve and join our species."   
  
(Quiet, dangerous, and is there an undertone there-- am I reading this right-- that speaks "he belongs to someone, lay off," and just really, who is that someone anyway?)   
  
Frank made a hysterical half-laugh/cry, and there were footsteps in the night-dirt of the compound.   
  
Soon Potter's voice said, "What in the name of Merciful Mother Mary is going on in here?"   
  
But really, in a way, there was only Hawkeye. And BJ, wishing those blue eyes would turn and look at him.   
  
"Colonel," greeted Hawkeye with preternatural composure, a quiescence to him that BJ had not seen before, as though in that last movement he had noticed something new within himself. He moved smoothly to the bed and settled into his former position, where BJ's hand crept tentatively back onto his knee, almost of its own volition.   
  
As Potter barreled through the door, Frank arched up again the tent wall like a small, ruby-eyed snake in the swinging lamplight.   
  
"Colonel!" he cried, a moment after Hawkeye.   
  
"I'm glad you boys still know my rank," said Potter, glaring at each of them in turn: Frank hunched concavely in the corner; Hawkeye a distant, hollow shape on the bed, emptied of light; BJ slightly wide-eyed beside him, hand draped over his knee, startled out of that usual steadiness. Then Potter saw George, unobtrusive behind Hawkeye, slowly clambering back into himself, and lowered his voice. "All right, let's hear it. Who's this, and why's Frank getting better acquainted with the floor?"   
  
BJ waited for Hawkeye to answer, but there was no sound, and so he spoke for them both.   
  
"Uh, Colonel, this is George." He realized with gray, faraway surprise that he didn't even know George's surname -- but why did that matter? Here, Korea putting down roots like fungus in all of them, George was no one to anyone; less than no one, less that the common soldier, because he was   
  
(Human.)   
  
something else.   
  
"That's an answer to one question," said Potter, and glanced at Frank, "even if it doesn't tell me anything."   
  
"This is the Army," interjected Hawkeye, with little of himself behind the words. "Do you really expect substantive answers from anyone?"   
  
"All right, Pierce," said Potter, sighing. "Why don't you come clean?"   
  
"I'll never come clean," replied Hawkeye. "I'm permanently soiled." Potter gave him a look. "Well, it's nothing new, Colonel - Frank needed some sense knocked into him, and I took it upon myself to help."   
  
Potter passed a hand wearily over his face.   
  
"All right," he said. "I should have known better than to expect a straight answer from you." There was a strangled noise from Frank across the room, a noise of indeterminate emotion. Potter didn't seem to notice. "All right, then. Hunnicutt, you tell me. What happened?"   
  
BJ tensed, and Hawkeye, feeling the tightening of the fingers on his leg, looked at him and touched his hand in discreet reassurance.   
  
"Frank was bothering George, and it was completely inappropriate. So... Hawkeye hit him."   
  
Potter's glance at Hawkeye was censorious, but they could see his jaw go rigid as he turned to face Frank.   
  
"Burns?" he prompted, in his voice that low undertone, like the grinding of stone, that they recognized as sheer rage. "What in God's name possessed you to act that way with a patient? You're a doctor, man!"   
  
"What?!" exclaimed Hawkeye, straightening up a bit. Potter, with the ease of custom, did not acknowledge him.   
  
Frank remained where he was, but he leaned forward intently and propped himself up against the nearby bed.   
  
"Colonel, I think it's my duty to inform you-"   
  
"It's your duty to answer me," interrupted Potter.   
  
"Well, I _am_, sir. You have to understand the _context_ of-"   
  
"Burns, I don't give a horse's hindquarters what the blasted context was. What were you doing?"   
  
"That man," said Frank, drawing himself up in affront, his long forefinger curling out inexorably toward George, who sat stiff-backed and vacant-eyed, edged in light like a figure cut from tin, "is a homosexual. And those two are too busy being bleeding-hearts to see what a threat he is."   
  
BJ sensed Hawkeye stir beside him, infused with sudden, brutal life.   
  
"Hang on a second," BJ murmured warningly, his voice between only them.   
  
Potter just waited, his back to the two captains, his shoulders together as if at attention, the winding sputter of the yellow lamps burning his shadow into the floor. At last, he put his hands into his pockets and said blandly, "How is he a threat, Burns?"   
  
Hawkeye and BJ exhaled in relief simultaneously: their body rhythms synchronized, bone and nerve endings somehow folded together like the minute, iridescent interplay of watch gears. Unexpectedly, BJ felt the covert pressure of Hawkeye's shoulder blade against the side of his chest, as the other doctor moved closer and rested against him. BJ froze, spared George an unfocused glance, and saw that the young man's attention was fully on Frank, hidden back there somewhere in the oily folds of tent-cloth. Then, carefully, he shifted position to accommodate Hawkeye.   
  
Hawkeye was shaking slightly. BJ soon found himself shaking too, so that their individual motions became inseparable.   
  
"_Colonel_!" protested Frank, blocked from their view by Potter's silhouette. "This is the Army!"   
  
"So men should be celibate here?" Potter asked, a touch of cool irony to his tone.   
  
"Men like that should be celibate everywhere," spat Frank, and BJ envisioned him squatting there, his upper lip lifted, the unreasoning glint of terror in his eyes, because it was Them, They were everywhere. He scrabbled in the dim corner, his mind turning circles upon itself, his head ducked low, trembling - pathetic --   
  
(BJ was gliding down Harper Lane on his new bike, the freedom of a Saturday afternoon flooding through his pumping muscles. Out on the narrow driveway, he and his father had fiddled with it, screwed down the seat, adjusted the pedals, so that now the chains sang fluidly as he hit a stretch of gravel.   
  
Across the street -- he knew, because it was always happening; somehow, beside the high white fence, down on the asphalt made bright by the night's rain, it was always replaying itself -- a tight knot of boys stood, their arms cocked back, hefting stones. Between the lean, tanned bars of their legs, someone rolled and doubled in on himself, hands raised.   
  
BJ knew on some level what it was that they chanted -- "Pansy, pansy!" -- and knew the bony rattle he heard was the shower of rocks in that closing circle, but somehow it didn't register, here among the carefully tended flowerbeds and neat shingled houses, and he leaned in, straining to hear, sick and suddenly heavy-limbed, until the bike scraped the curb and he was falling.   
  
As the street reared up to meet him, he thought he saw, pale and stunned and uncomprehending, Peg's face in one of windows above, hands pressed to the glass as he fell away.)   
  
"_How_ is he a threat?" Frank was repeating, incredulous.   
  
"That's what he asked," chimed in Hawkeye with bitter satisfaction. "How - not who, not what, not when or why or where." BJ jabbed him lightly with an elbow. They didn't need Frank, in all his no-lipped fury, peering around Potter to retort and noticing the way they had become inextricably tangled.   
  
Then, like a sixth sense, suspicion flooded BJ, and he remembered George, his hands folded politely, his eyes sheer and reflective and unfaceted as a pane of glass, sitting just on the other side of Hawkeye. BJ didn't move for a moment, because it was always something. There was always a body in the way, Potter shielding him from Frank, Hawkeye shielding him from George, and somehow, always and forever, the smooth arc of Peg curving away in the darkness, illuminated when even the floodlights trailed off, when he felt It pool coldly where his heart was supposed to be. He raised his eyes and looked over Hawkeye's shoulder.   
  
For a moment, it seemed as if George had dissolved entirely; vanished underground to surface elsewhere, someplace safe. But no, there he was-it was only the bright, spoiling yellow light of Hawkeye's lamp and the straw-blond of George's hair that made him seem too diffuse to look at. George's eyes were unfocused and dim, so BJ looked, really looked and saw only that old window with its dripping glass and Peg locked away behind it. George's eyes were such a light, ceramic blue, and Hawkeye's orbs had all the furious Atlantic locked away; it was Peg's eyes -- this is insane-- Peg's eyes he saw peering out that window, brown touched with hazel and understanding and for the first time BJ thought perhaps the woman with his wife's face was not the one he knew.   
  
"He's a threat to security!" Frank's voice had reached a truly painful pitch, as off-key as Mulcahy's piano meanderings-- the tone was fumbling, but the words were a weapon fashioned in haste and rage, not notes dropped from the fingers of a priest too tired and heartsick to pray with his voice.   
  
"Sir," Frank rose very briefly to his feet, then seemed to fall back against his cot, heavy with sweat and the lingering scent of Margaret and dreams in which sharp brown eyes measured him through silver glasses and found him always wanting. "The man is a homosexual. He's not a real man! He's a weakness for the enemy to exploit."   
  
"Frank," said Potter with patience like that toward a blindly angry mutt, "how do you _know_ he's a h--" The country doctor frowned, as if faced with some exotic species, just different. "Homosexual?"   
  
"They said--"   
  
Quick like a shot from the cavalry man, "Who?"   
  
"His fellow enlisted men--"   
  
At that, George seemed to snap back to the crowded Swamp and the smell of fermenting gin; his eyes met BJ's with brief and almost painful understanding. BJ imagined those eyes following another form-tall perhaps, lanky?-- marching ahead of George, someone cared for whose name was shouted by the shells as they rained. George's gaze dropped and seemed to trace the places where Hawkeye and BJ touched-- palm to palm, hand to knee, and back to chest, as if they might suddenly melt into one another and become a sum total.   
  
_In the mess tent, Igor was letting the creamed corn slide lazily out of the ladle. Hawkeye's voice was just a rumble without words, all brash and flashy with defiance despite the rusting of Korea's soil over his whole.   
BJ said, "Easy, Hawk."   
And Igor, without looking up, handed them two matching trays for one person. "Here you go, PierceIntyre."_   
  
So, Pierce and Hunnicutt, Pierceinncut, Pierce and Cut, isn't that a laugh!   
  
"Colonel Potter." George's voice rang out like a distant sound you can't quite identify. "I'm... I never intended to cause any trouble."   
  
"He speaks," said Hawkeye rather blandly, with a smile at George to take the edge off.   
  
"Amazing things happen when Frank shuts up," BJ added, watching Frank's mouth form words like "disgusting" and "sick" and "filthy" without any audience at all.   
  
"Don't apologize, son." Potter took a step forward, seemed not to see this new cocoon of Hawkeye and BJ, hands here and there and bodies resting together ready to metamorphose. "Frank's a doctor. You'd think all that book learning might knock some sense into his head, but we're starting to figure it's too small to fit much. He's outta line." And there-- BJ didn't need to look to see Frank's face as Potter placed his hand on George's shoulder. It was the face of every boy on that white-picket-fence lane, shouting "Pansy, pansy!" while the adults turned their eyes away to pretend it wasn't there.   
  
(Peg's voice as she sat on her porch, home from school, her head on BJ's shoulder;   
"Humans can be so cruel." Yes, and in one hand the tattered remains of her baseball glove, which the girls had stolen to burn, and in the other a tome proclaiming "Thrilling Wonder Stories!" with the promise of a bright rocket's escape skittering across the cover. Ungirl, Peg had been taunted with, It and Thing and Alien. But BJ could remember how she placed her tongue between her lips, eyes bright as she watched the ball. A*cack*! Such a fluid swing, there the white orb went into the heavens, an arch like the curve of the breasts she would grow. He remembered kissing them, soft and more than a little bit shy; remembered Erin curled against them. It was only now that he remembered Peg crying, arms crossed over her traitorous chest.   
Her voice, again. "BJ, girls don't play baseball. Mom says it's not lady-like.")   
  
"Colonel, I object!" Frank sputtered.   
  
"Yes, Frank," Hawkeye tossed lightly, "you are an object. We've been trying to figure out what you are for ages. Maybe it's time we dissected you and made sure."   
  
"It's not for you to object." The old soldier's voice was strangely calm, waiting for the funnel cloud to touch down. "Major Burns, you have behaved in a manner this evening ill befitting an officer, a doctor--"   
  
"Not to mention a gentlemen, a human being or even a semi-intelligent life-form." Hawkeye again, before BJ could move his hand as if to steady the words. He realized that Hawkeye couldn't stop, wouldn't stop, until either he or Frank dropped dead from exhaustion-- until Frank's bigotry stopped ringing in the air or Hawkeye's soul had no ears with which to hear it.   
  
He had the sudden, crazy image of an angel-Hawkeye (what a thought, that!), like the illustrations of Michael in his father's Bible. Sword raised against Satan-- and even God if He should judge-- because life was Hawkeye's trade and death was just that personal. Live and let live.   
  
_Hawkeye's voice, wrapped in nightmares on the other side of the Swamp;   
"God, let them live!"_   
  
"Thank you, Captain Pierce." Potter's eyes flashed behind the ancient lenses. "Frank-- you'll see the MPs in a few minutes if you don't get out of here before a little lamb could even _think_ of shaking its tail. I don't care where you go-- just don't come back until you've walked off this tantrum and are willing to act at least a little older than my grandson. God knows he has more sense than you-- but try for manners."   
  
"I will not be kicked out of my own billet by a yellow-bellied pansy! I--"   
  
"DISMISSED!" Potter's voice seemed to pick Frank up by his collar-the Major threw a sheering glance across the room, as if to raze the tent to the ground, but he turned and vanished into the night with the other boogey-men, crawling in the darkness of Korea and children's dreams.   
  
Pause. Next act-- everyone get your programs out. Hawkeye met BJ's gaze; like a pure beam of energy, that glance settled somewhere inside the younger man, becoming part of his bones. George was silent and still, and Potter was frozen in his attitude of command-- BJ realized he couldn't feel the expression on his face and felt somehow exposed. The band of gold on his finger could not cover his vulnerability.   
  
"Hawkeye," Potter said quietly, "next time Burns gets this way, get the MPs to beat some sense into him. I know you'd like to do it yourself, but one of these days he is going to nail you for striking a superior officer."   
  
"Frank's not superior to anything." Hawkeye waved his hands. "Even HQ has enough brain cells to recognize that."   
  
"You'd fight this whole war yourself if you thought it'd end sooner." The old man's voice was surprisingly gentle, almost fatherly and pained. In the same breath, he said to George, "Come on, son. I'll walk you back to post op." He led the patient away like a parent teaching a child to walk-- pausing at the door, the light obscuring his face so that BJ and Hawkeye heard "Night, boys. Take it easy," but had no context of expression in which to read it. Two voices raised and said "goodnight" to the colonel, but BJ couldn't figure how it could be himself or his partner, because their gazes had locked again and the language of his thoughts wouldn't translate.   
  
"Right," said Potter, either to George or to himself. "Goodnight."   
  
_I wonder if everyone in Korea is running by two times-- clock hands racing against each other. Here, near the damn old 38th, it's such-and-such hour, but what time is it in Mill Valley, Boston, Crabapple Cove, Toledo, Ottumwa? What are Mother, Father, Sis, Peg, Erin, Dad, Ma, Uncle Ed, Laverne, Mildred doing now?_   
  
Time change, times change-- the international dateline like the Great Wall of China and you were just shouting over it, hoping the others could hear.   
  
Maybe Peg was in the living room, rocking Erin in the curves of the chair and her embrace, staring out at the back yard and the apple tree, dangling fruit just out of reach. And maybe Daniel Pierce was tired and just getting home, tipping his hat to the picture of his wife sitting on the piano. Hawkeye had spoken about that, once-- that portrait of Ms. Maddoc Pierce, that single remaining flash of mother, which he greeted in the morning and said farewell to at night. Perhaps they, too, (Peg, trying on some type of grotesque widowhood; Daniel, railing against his childlessness) could see BJ and Hawkeye, sitting together, not speaking-- as if through a magic mirror or wishing well.   
  
If they could see, then they would watch the two doctors lean toward each other and pull away-- fearful and heady and caring and needy. They would see the mouths opening and not making words.   
  
They would see Hawkeye reach out and turn off the light.   


**

To be continued

**


	6. Chapter VI

**

Chapter VI

**

BJ fumbled, trying to find the lamp before his eyes adjusted and he saw Hawkeye with fatal clarity. Hawkeye intercepted his hand.   
  
"What're you doing?" asked BJ shakily.   
  
"You'll knock something over," said Hawkeye. "And if you want to break something, we should at least go over to Frank's side."   
  
"No, I mean, what are we -- why are the lights out?"   
  
"Potter said goodnight. I don't know about you, but I don't want him scolding me for leaving the light on." A smile softened his voice. "You don't like the dark?"   
  
But it wasn't like that at all. He was under Hawkeye's arm, and it wasn't the childhood darkness it had once been, back when he sat in his bedroom, down the long hall where shadows stood and walked into the night, where he sometimes caught echoes of his parents' voices, distorted and distant. He could feel the blankets where he'd tangled himself into them; and then, later, he would be in the bedroom of their first apartment, Peg draped smoothly over him, his back wedged against the headboard, don't let go, for God's sake, don't let go. And now, when he knew he was slipping back, Korea and his two-month life eroding beneath him, he leaned harder into the circle of Hawkeye's arm and tried to stay there, in the comfortable dark, in Hawkeye's breath.   
  
"It's not that," replied BJ. "It was just - unexpected."   
  
"It threw you," said Hawkeye. "Wasn't that how you put it, earlier?"   
  
"Most of Korea has thrown me, Hawk," said BJ carefully. "It's not that you -- or George -- did anything."   
  
(Of course, life is full of things that take you by the throat; BJ knew, knew how people passed through your life like the flare of a candle, and that was why he had to be certain that Peg was right. Slowly, slowly, every movement precise, so that one night, in an abandoned lot where the forsythia teased up over the rotting wooden slats of the fence, he held her loosely in the hollow between his shoulders and showed her how to hit a line drive. She was still an odd mixture of curves and edges, unfamiliar, but he knew this scene, its unlit anonymity, and he had thought of what to do, and when Peg turned her head a little and kissed him, he kissed her back and thought, This is how it's done.   
  
Funny thing, then: ten years later, in red light and drifting smoke, it was someone else's arm on his back when he leaned over and retched into the grass. And when that somehow not-strange voice told him, almost soundlessly, that it would be all right, he looked up and was burned clear through by the sun, by that face with its gray pain and sympathy and desperation, and it was as though he had all at once been emptied of all that had gone before.   
  
And the bat connected -- straight out over left field.)   
  
They were still touching on the bed, but Hawkeye let BJ's hand drop and sat silently. BJ, feeling the void open up beside him, knew Hawkeye had gone away - maybe into the creases George had left, where BJ could not go. Hawkeye and George had nothing to hold them in their skins; it was painless to step out of time, because who would notice? Daniel Pierce, knowing only the unbroken memory of Hawkeye, like the portrait of Maddoc and her ambiguous smile on the piano? A young, smooth-faced soldier, glancing back and noticing with vague interest the gap in the line behind him? Day by day, as Peg receded behind the high window where the glass blurred like steam, BJ found he could follow Hawkeye a little farther into the close darkness of that place.   
  
"You asked me," said Hawkeye casually, after a long time. His voice was low and indistinct, phantasmal; like Mother and Father down the labyrinthine hall, a sound from another world.   
  
"What?" BJ tried to look at him.   
  
(George crouches under the hanging folds of a blanket canopy, flipping the deck with a smooth movement of his wrist. The bleeding illumination of the lantern: whose face will turn up?)   
  
"You asked me," repeated Hawkeye.   
  
"_What_?"   
  
"You just said that George and I didn't do anything. But before, you asked if I'd ever - done something. What George did. Does."   
  
(Past or present, does anyone know? Can the dateline do _that_, can it divide you up that neatly, Peg here on one side, and -- oh, God, only Hawkeye on the other, in that nebulous time between dark and dawn?)   
  
"And you never answered," said BJ.   
  
"No." Hawkeye laughed, a harsh, jangling noise, half in and half out of his body, as though he lingered on the threshold, waiting to see if it was worth coming back to. "Because you said you didn't think about it. And, you know, I wouldn't want to ask you to be _impetuous_ or anything."   
  
"You think about different things during the night," said BJ, and then he paused. "No, that's not what I mean. You admit to thinking about different things during the night."   
  
"It's always night here, Beej," confided Hawkeye. "God, you never wake up." His tone was hypnotic, like Peg's bike wheel on the grass, the spokes flashing by. Here goes sobriety; here goes sanity; here goes--   
  
"You still haven't answered, Hawk."   
  
"When was the last time you answered a letter from Peg?"   
  
"Monday," replied BJ guardedly. "What does that--"   
  
"No, I mean really _answered_. When was the last time you wrote home and said, Hi, Peg, today I played shrapnel hide-and-seek in some eighteen-year-old boy's gut, today I found someone else's bone fragment driven into the leg of a soldier, today I stitched up a Korean kid who made the mistake of playing in what passes for her back yard, and then I came home and lost thirty bucks in a poker game and drank myself stupid and tormented Frank Burns with my depraved bunkmate?" BJ was silent. "Does anybody know about that, BJ? I mean, does anyone know who you are here? And I - " He reached out and grasped BJ's shoulder, hard, like an anchor to the last vestiges of himself. "Dammit, BJ, I have no one to answer to here, and I might not be able to--"   
  
"She wouldn't understand," said BJ musingly. "I would tell her, but she wouldn't understand."   
  
(She's back behind the glass, distorted beyond all recognition. If she looked through at him, would she even know this person who works BJ's mouth and moves with BJ's oblivious smoothness and loves something that should not be BJ's?)   
  
Hawkeye held his shoulder, and BJ stayed quite still, even as it began to hurt. In time, Hawkeye was calm again and could remove his hand, shuddering slightly with the effort. Only a brief contact, really, but one that flooded BJ with strangeness. Strange, because it _was_ strange, as Hawkeye was strange, like shifting shadow; and foreign, that blunt, clumsy word people used for Korea and all the places where they never expected to end up -- it was utterly alien, the way Hawkeye touched BJ, as no one had touched or would touch him again. And yet, underneath the unmapped territory of Hawkeye's skin, BJ found a pulse that was somehow familiar, and he knew what Hawkeye would say before he heard:   
  
"I'm sorry. What you say to Peg is none of my business."   
  
"It isn't," BJ agreed. "She has nothing to do with here. With us, here. But neither did my question, so...." He shrugged. "I'm sorry, too." A beat, and he made as if to rise, feeling for the light. "I'm just going to turn this on."   
  
"No," said Hawkeye quietly, and BJ hesitated. "No," repeated Hawkeye more clearly. "Leave it off, wouldja, Beej? I'd rather not look at this place any more than I have to."   
  
"But I can't _see_," BJ said, mock-plaintively.   
  
"Isn't that the point?" asked Hawkeye, his voice, for a moment, nearly unrecognizable.   
  
BJ trembled and stood, his hands at his side, his ears ringing with dead sound   
  
(Echoes down the hall; echoes of Peg through the thin wall, singing "Hush, Little Baby" in the low tone she used in the dark -- and if that diamond ring don't shine brightly enough on Korean nights, well, we'll find something else; echoes in the gypsy's voice, except you can't call them echoes, can you, if they haven't yet been made into sound: you will meet a stranger you already know.)   
  
"I can't get back to my bed without the lamp," BJ explained.   
  
And Hawkeye, sifting coolly back into himself, full, open, said, "So stay here."   
  
Maybe he should have been holding his breath, should have felt poised on the knife's edge between the bright, airy world of his San Francisco home and the endless, open pit of Korea. If he closed his eyes, BJ could imagine other men, faces of patients, of soldiers and young boys, peering over into that darkness-- the soil of this country was the blood of fighting men, American and Korean and Chinese and tribesmen way, far back past memory. Because as long as humans were alive, they fought, and as long as they fought, someone came, took the doctor's hand in theirs and begged them, begged them, to take the pain away.   
  
"I don't even have a prescription for myself!" BJ thought with a sort of wild calmness, because that knife's edge just wasn't there. Far away, like a dream or a shadow thrown by the moon, he could see Peg's shadow, a gentle curtain over Erin's crib. That first day in Korea, with the rush from the propellers, the dull hum of the bar, and the casual insanity of a man who'd looked like his heart had just been broken-- well, BJ Hunnicutt, the decision has already been made.   
  
(You knew it when he bought you a drink at Rosie's, when he ushered you into the tent like a bellhop gone mad. A touch to your hand, your hip, your shoulder, an anchor to the earth, because even Koreans believe you can lose your soul.)   
  
"I'll stay," BJ said, turning the phrase over. So easy and so hard; a natural conclusion that cut and remade and adapted him to the sprawling monster of war; evolution. Hawkeye's touch was delicate against BJ's cheeks, finding the other man's mouth without sight. Long fingers, those, and talented-- a pianist of the human body, juggler of cards. And because he knew Hawkeye would not take this thing without permission, BJ craned his neck and brought their lips together, hands furrowing into silky black hair. Later, he would remember Hawkeye's voice next to his ear, soft, urgent, saying the craziest things   
  
(Hawkeye always says the craziest things, talks the craziest shit-- the truth, plain, unapologetic, and the fact the army won't let us have that truth makes it beautiful and rare.   
Crazy shit. Crazy.)   
  
but for now the world was being stripped away, color by color and line by line, until BJ buried his face in Hawkeye's shoulder and Korea was a place he'd left behind. 

* * * * * * * * *

  
He dreamed that a map of the world was burning, color-coded countries and borders all aflame. Time was too much for him-- he was breathless but he couldn't stop, and somewhere in the charred remains of that pale atlas, it was raining and the mud was as thick as the blood on soldiers' boots. Another breathing, war-torn country, somewhere, devouring lives and faces. BJ could see a nurse, harried and cloaked in the sky's salt water tears, moving from stretcher to stretcher. The carnage was the same awake as it was asleep-- that old terminal lead poisoning, or land mines, or a bayonet, nine thousand and fifty one ways to mutilate the human body; some new ones, too-- gas, flickering chemicals. Someone lifted a light, catching raindrops into gold; the nurse turned, soft brown hair plastered against her pale cheeks, eyes hard and panicked and hurting.   
  
The nurse was Erin-- BJ knew that somehow, saw the lines of his baby girl in the woman clad by soaked army greens. The blood on her innocent hands was the same as the blood on his own; the blood of children, because no one would stop fighting long enough to look around.

* * * * * * * * *

  
Waking in Hawkeye's arms was strange. A surreal experience, made more so by the comfortable feeling of the body curled up against his. Raising his head, BJ felt the decadence of their carelessness-- it was late, and the Swamp was empty save the two of them, but possibility hung rancid in the air.   
  
"I'm one of them," BJ startled himself by speaking, soft as it was. The enemy, hiding in Frank's bunk, one of _those_ amongst the freckle-faced troops. In the dim light of the flood lamps, he saw the child Hawkeye eased into when he was asleep. The older man was clutching BJ's dog tags in one fine, expressive hand... brother, friend, lover, fellow "one of them," and a dozen other endearments there weren't words for yet. Carefully, BJ disentangled himself, feeling keenly each place where his own body touched Hawkeye's, a new awareness, an extension of self.   
  
"Where you goin'?" the other doctor mumbled, half into BJ's hand and half into the pillow.   
  
"To my own bed." BJ felt ridiculous pressing a kiss against Hawkeye's forehead, but the gesture could not be held back. "It's safer."   
  
"Safer, more lonely, farther," Hawkeye grumbled. "More colder, too."   
  
"Half asleep, you're a grammar teacher's nightmare, you know that?" BJ cracked quietly, his own dreams shifting beneath his skin.   
  
(It's the truth, you know-- the bed is colder, and it's not even safer because you might roll over, might displace your soul, and who will hold onto you then? And if you wake up, with the image of your baby daughter's bloodstained face so vivid like a gunshot in your mind, well... who will be there? Will you tell me? Who?)   
  
It was almost funny-- BJ almost started laughing-- but he hoped with a hope tinged green by jealous, red by anger and hue upon hue with sorrow and love and understanding, that Peg had someone to hold onto her, too.   
  
(Everybody needs somebody.   
Some body. My body, your body, the body is sacred.   
Well, so is marriage, but, hell, war's been blow'n' the human husk into giblets for ages. Who's to say it hasn't been doing the same for that other, oh-so-sacred institution.   
I do love you, Peg. And because I love you, I want you to be loved, and, God help me, I want to be loved too.)   
  
In the quiet of the compound, Hawkeye's warmth was easily conjured, relaxing BJ into sleep. His last thought was of George, who would-- thanks to Frank-- probably soon be shipped like so much cured meat   
(just another trigger finger, sir!)   
back to the front lines. George, who marched amongst those all-American boys, defined by the masses because of who, and why, and how. The so-called enemy, flipping over tarot cards with all the languid carelessness of fate. Someone's brother, father, friend, or lover, following the foretold stranger out into the darkness that was Korea, that would be Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan....   
  
Would be.   
  
Come up closer to the fire, soldier, and have a drink.   
  
We're all strangers, here. 

**

FIN

**


End file.
